


And One More for the Road

by djsoliloquy



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Companions, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Holidays, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/djsoliloquy/pseuds/djsoliloquy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Young man like you must have family,” Lily says, her voice dragging him from his thoughts. She loves talking about her grandchildren but this is the first time she’s included him in that pastime.</p><p>The muscles in his face tighten. He is tired, thirsty, caught off guard by the question. “No,” he says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And One More for the Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dizzy_fire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dizzy_fire/gifts).



> Yuletide Treat! Based around a request line about Boone and Lily having adventures together. Because that had to be done.

At sundown they sneak into the barn, chasing rumors of water and half-dose madness.

A rusted wire fence twists around the property, cut and tangled in places. Two long-dead bodies sit propped against a wooden post, arm bones entwined, eye sockets staring over the field. One corpse is much smaller than the other.

The barn looks like an empty shell but they go slow. Lily has a hunch, and they plan it as their last search before taking the McCarran monorail into the Strip. Boone crouches a safe ways away, listening and watching, almost too thirsty to care if it's safe or not. He doesn’t bother checking over his shoulder. He wouldn’t see Lily anyway, and whatever’s unfortunate enough to try sneaking up from behind is going to meet with an unexpected blue end. He hears her nearby, breathing like a big old furnace.

Gun out, Boone leads the way. Empty liquor bottles litter the floor. The air is lifeless, no fresh smells of food or fire. They edge around the walls, checking boxes and avoiding the open space in the middle of the barn.

Something stirs in the deeper shadows. They freeze and Boone to lift his rifle in anticipation of a quick shot.

“Who’s there?” a voice calls out. A man with sunken cheeks trips out of a stall to run at them. Alone. Unarmed, or too far gone to draw. Not a Fiend. A different kind of wildness. Boone takes all this in, readjusts, and slams the butt of his gun in the man’s face, sending him careening back.

Instead of running, the man forces himself up. “Where is she?” he begs, horrified. “ _Where is she?_ ”

He grabs a sharp tool from the table, not really seeing them as he runs forward. Boone steps back, and Lily brings the flat of her blade down on the man’s head. A dull crunch as his skull snaps into his spine, and the body crumples to the floor.

No water or phantoms can be found in the barn. Boone and Lily move on.

 

Boredom and desperation is what initially drives them off the Strip, into the wide roaring grave of the Mojave.

Because it’s quiet when they’re left behind. Not the stillness of the open desert but quiet all the same. They wander rooms, not much to do but sit in different chairs and stare at different patches of peeling Lucky 38 wallpaper. Depending on the hour they hear hints of an outside world—a radio left on in the morning, some holiday excitement down on the Strip. It could be a long wait between visits, when the Courier returns and picks someone else to go.

It's the doctor's turn this time. Lily spells it out as soon as they leave: she’d as soon spend her time looking for her grandkids as waiting around. Everyone agrees, at least about getting out. If only for a while. If only to see some of the Strip lit up in seasonal decorations, all the tourists in their holiday best.

The Courier wouldn’t even have to know, Veronica mentions with a strange seriousness. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

Boone’s not sure he agrees. When he looks at the rest of them he sees bunch of broken isolated people, stuck together for a short time with nothing to do but sit around and wait for the end or the Courier or both. The difference between them is Boone's better at waiting. What's another day? What does it matter where you wait?

When the others go to pack ammo and socks he finds himself in the hall with Lily.

She surprises him by walking over. “Why don’t you come with me, dearie?” she says in that voice like rusty chainsaws and carton-a-day habits. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be. You wouldn’t let grandma go all by herself would you?”

No time to object.

Boone never knew his grandmothers but he can recognize a guilt trip. And he always knows when he’s outmaneuvered.

 

He doesn't pack enough water by half and it isn't an accident. He just doesn't care. If they don't find supplies then they don't find supplies. If that's where it ends for him that's where it ends. The fact he'd leave Lily stranded by herself in the Wasteland barely registers. She's a seven-foot super mutant in a granny straw hat. It's the rest of the wide irradiated yonder that should be worried.

They form an odd bond as soon as they leave the suite. Tourists flee before them while she shares her opinion on the Gomorrah workers across the street. Mortified civilians shoulder Boone aside without taking him in, too busy being chased down the street by the specter of grandmotherly disapproval. 

People aren't staring at him anymore. That suits him fine.

They both view life in terms of straight lines and cause-effect. In skirmishes he picks off most everything at a distance, and whatever makes it through ends up wishing it hadn't. He doesn’t talk much and she talks plenty, mostly about the grandkids he’s helping her look for. After only a few nights of travel he’s acquainted with not only their names but their favorite colors, animals, and family holiday traditions.

It takes him a while to figure out her grandchildren are dead.

Mechanical pragmatic optimism, on his part—if they’re very lucky they died a long time ago. The possibility they’re alive somewhere doesn't occur to him in any way he can honestly acknowledge.

He shrugs off how Lily calls him Jimmy at times. At some point he can't ignore the rest. Maybe around the point he hears about Leo, or her pills.

Or when they stumble on a nest of cazadores and he sees one of her mental breaks. “Get behind grandma!” she hollers and runs foward before he can stop her. With her in front he can't shoot, and as he fights his way forward to help anyway, Lily  _changes_. He sees her snatch two cazadores out of the air by the wings and beat them against the rocks, all hints of the loving grandmother gone. Suddenly there are no grandchildren, no quest to find them. There is only the battle. 

They almost don't win.

When the last cazadore is dead Lily falls over, passed out maybe. Boone slides to the ground between the bodies of dog-sized insects, feeling like he should keep his distance. And while he watches her, Boone thinks,  _so that's what it'd be like to forget_. 

He keeps his scope trained on her in case she wakes dangerous, holding his rifle level as his muscles begin seizing in venom contractions. When Lily wakes it’s as though it never happened. She fine-tunes her hat and looks at him, down in the dirt and finally administering the last antivenom to himself even as his extremities go numb.

“Ready to go, dear?” she rumbles in her cheerful way.

Her grandkids are dead, Boone considers. He’s alone in the Mojave with a nightkin who doesn't take all her meds. He's out of antivenom and low on water, hiking across the harsh indifferent desert with every last oversized stinging biting well-armed son of a bitch in the Wasteland between them and the ghosts of her family. To go on would be tempting fate at best. Suicide at anything else.

With a nod he picks himself up and follows her.

 

After failing to find provisions in the barn, he almost envies the dead man. Boone doesn't look back on the other two skeletons by the field. He figures the three of them are together now at least.

You can't be thirsty when you're dead. The water shortage haunts him more than radscorpions or Legion raiding parties. Lily appears to require less to drink, but she's the only exception. They pass withered sage and agave, tumbleweed that crushes to dust underfoot. Salty puddles laced with radium, arsenic. Brahmin carcasses on the side of the road, sometimes near those puddles, covered in stretched husks of skin. Gutted shells of old buildings dot the landscape like the skeletons of giants, bleaching white against ridges of red brown stone. The sun roars overhead, relentless.

They camp that night against an old abandoned rock fence, their breath steaming in the chill air. The light is a risk, and so is the fire in such dry weather, but Boone gets a small flame going. It's been around a week since they left the Strip. He's only pretty sure he'll wake up again in the morning. His heart pounds hard to push his blood around, and he can't tell if the headache and nausea are from lack of water or a spike in radiation, or whether he should be concerned about where they've been camping. He learned in basic training to worry more about the resulting stomach trouble than the rads—a medic can heal radiation poisoning, but in the desert no one can afford to lose fluids.

“Young man like you must have family,” Lily says, her voice dragging him from his thoughts. She loves talking about her grandchildren but this is the first time she’s tried including him in that pastime.

The muscles in his face tighten. He is tired, thirsty, caught off guard by the question. “No,” he says.

He stares past the campfire into the black. Lily looks at him and waits.

A different conversation surfaces in Boone's memory, when he finally told the Courier about Bitter Springs. Nothing came of it. They parted soon after and Boone returned to the Lucky 38, and Boone regrets that conversation too, in a way. Not enough to dwell on it one way or another. Maybe he thought they would go, that it would change something—Bitter Springs would have been as good a place as any to breathe his last, if it came to that. But they didn’t go and it won’t change anything, and Boone doesn’t see the point in preoccupying himself with it. Talking doesn’t fix anything.

“Thinking of settling down soon, then,” Lily wheedles, not about to let him drop the subject. “And making your parents lots of grandbabies of course.”

The wind dies down, dropping them into disorienting desert silence. New Vegas in the distance and the glowing coals of their fire remain the only points of perspective in the darkness.

He takes a deep breath and reaches for his rifle, starts cleaning to keep his hands busy. “I don’t think so.” 

“Bad things happen, dear,” says Lily with unexpected insight, giving a reassuring squeeze to the small part of his shoulder she can get her hand around. The pressure makes his vision bloom in dark spots. “Sometimes you don’t get over them. But those things are past. You listen to grandma now, you hear?”

For a second Boone is so angry he has to stop cleaning, his hands locked in tight grips. He's never been closer to disagreeing with her. To  _telling_  her. The past isn’t something you get over. The past irradiates everything and nobody gets away untouched, not while they're still breathing. Boone is here and alive, without Carla or the baby, living through every moment into the next and it never stops feeling like it’s killing him. Lily Bowen’s family is dead and the difference between them is Lily doesn't know it yet. The difference is Lily didn't have to pull the trigger herself. She’s a half-dose away from losing any hope of finding something that isn’t there to find, and it wouldn’t _make a difference either way._

Would he give up Carla’s memory if he could slaughter anyone who stood against him? He could take on more of the Legion. He’d never become that crazed man in the barn, alone with his regret and eventually taken by the desert. He would never again catch himself imagining perfume on the wind, or dreaming of a song in the pre-dawn hours before he wakes enough to bury the memory. Who's to say that wouldn't be _better?_

A long time ago everything went to hell. The bombs fell and the world carried on anyway, not fixed or dead but it carried on, and here they are two centuries later dealing with the same old shit, the memory of life’s refrain. Sometimes Boone thinks the world’s got no place being this broke and still working.

Yet, for how tempting it sounds to forget, he suddenly isn't sure. For how little he cares about things he does still care for Carla. Even if it’s just the part of her he carries around in his head. 

He gets to cleaning again, fussing with the problem spots where sand can slip in. Neither of them are going to find their family out here. Could be it's wrong to let Lily chase madness like this. But Boone isn't going to be the one who does it. He's not going to be the one who kills them for her.

“I did. Once,” he says. He never knew his grandmothers, but maybe having one would be like this. This small piece of honesty. “Had a… family. It was good. For a while.”

Lily makes a deep rolling growl in her chest, an amplified  _hmm_  of understanding. “I'm sorry. That’s too bad, sweetie.”

Yeah, Boone thinks. That about sums it up.

 

Everyone but the Courier is back in the suite when they return.

Boone could have swore he heard talk of them all having better things to do, yet they’re all at the kitchen table pouring drinks. Cass trying not to laugh into her glass, Veronica next to her laughing hard. ED-E floating overhead covered in a string of lights, and Raul leaning in his chair to scratch Rex’s side till a hind leg kicks. Even Arcade is back from his time with the Courier, face down on the table and looking like he needs something higher proof to continue existing. Laughter and excited barking fills the room. A cheer goes up when they come in, with calls to join the fun despite Lily’s admonishments for all the drinking.

Boone finds water in the refrigerator and goes back into the hall. They patched him up at McCarran before he and Lily took the monorail in, but he's still tired. He collapses on the couch and closes his eyes, still not dead and listening to the others through the walls. They sound familiar in a distant way. Like downtime in the army, before it went bad. The sound he imagined when he used to think about his future. 

“You look lost,” says Cass from the doorway.

He turns to her sharply, caught on the memory of the last woman who said that to him.

“What did you say?” he says.

Cass raises an eyebrow. A fresh surge of laughter, barking, and Arcade’s pained groans erupt from the kitchen behind her. “Well, everyone is obviously in there," she says. "And here you are, out here.” She sits beside him on the couch. He frowns. “You have something against helping us break the record for most fucked-up beings in one room at the same time or what? The shit of years past on your mind?”

A wet cough interrupts from the doorway. “Oh are we moving into the hallway? Don’t answer that, shh, no one answer that,” says Arcade, wobbling out of the kitchen with a whiskey, falling onto the couch on Boone’s other side. “With any luck everyone else won’t catch on until my head stops throbbing. What is this distilled from by the way, pure evil?” he says, leaning across Boone to wave the bottle at Cass. “Have we addressed why we're in the hallway, again?”

“Yeah, why are we in the hallway?” says Veronica, followed by Raul. “Oh, oh, can I guess? Is this the part where the grumpy NCR sniper has issues about his past?”

“Honestly? I’m holding out for it to be an allergy to fun,” Raul says.

Their tones are cheerful, only lightly teasing. Boone reacts little to them. Residual tension hums through him. The Mojave is still there with him, waiting for a moment of carelessness, and he isn’t prepared for the shock of artificial lighting and idle chatter after a week of the desert. While they talk, Rex pads out and rests his head on Boone’s lap. Along with ED-E and Lily, the rest of them gather around the couch like it's storytime, Boone more or less at the center. He's too tired to be annoyed, nerves scrubbed raw, but he is feeling less patient than usual. If that's possible. 

Veronica sits on the floor in front of him, leaning back on her hands. “Hey, come on. Relax. What’s out there sucks, but you got to lighten up a little, move on.”

“Like all of you did?” Boone says, and everyone goes quiet.

The precision of it surprises him. For a shot in the dark it certainly hit a lot of targets. Veronica first looks shocked, then like she wants to punch him. Even Arcade is frowning guardedly. “Yeah,” Boone says at last. “Moving on. That must be why we’re all spending tonight at home with family.”

For a moment they all stare at their feet. ED-E beeps gently above them.

“Well,” Veronica says, first defiant then thoughtful. “Maybe. We kind of are. I mean. A little. Right?”

The tension melts to something mellower. Cass rolls her eyes but she’s smirking slightly as she tips her bottle back, and there are other small smiles around the group. Rex wags his tail. “What a nice thing to say, dear,” says Lily.

“I know the sudden air of depression makes  _me_  feel right at home,” Arcade says, and he sighs. “Apologies. Nowhere near drunk enough to allow a perfectly sincere comment go without a snide remark.”

“Let’s fix that,” says Cass, handing Boone a glass and passing a second whiskey bottle around. “So... welcome back, I guess,” she says with a dark grin to soften the words, pouring Boone a measure from her personal bottle. “The suite wasn’t complete without that brooding silence.”

“And we finally have everyone together in the same room!” Veronica says, clapping her hands.

“In the hallway,” Raul says.

“It still counts!”

“Cheers, you sad square-jawed bastard,” says Arcade warmly, clicking his bottle to Boone’s glass. “Cheers, all.”

“And a happy fucking new year,” Cass adds.

“You watch your mouth, young lady,” says Lily.

Boone's no more likely to find family in this suite than in the Mojave Wasteland. Boone looks down at his glass and conversation builds around him, shared tales of holidays past, the almost mythical feel of Raul and Lily’s childhoods. They’re all still just a bunch of isolated broken people and dog and robot stuck together for a short time. That hasn’t changed. Though maybe that’s basically like family to begin with. Or like anyone. Stuck in the world and getting by. Making it work. 

Makes for better drinking company than ghosts, anyway.

Boone sighs and kicks back his drink, to the accompaniment of applause, barking, and pleased electronic tones. Cass pours him another, and the night unfolds.

 

Silence.

Not the silence of the Wasteland, but of a casino hotel floor full of sleeping occupants. When Boone nodded off on the couch Cass and Arcade had been slouched on either side of him, heads pillowed on his shoulders. A drool smudge is on his left side, and he tries to remember which one of them that was. Both are gone now, maybe asleep in real beds.

He guesses it’s morning. Hard to say without windows. He lifts his eyes to the closed elevator. This is more the silence in the eye of a sandstorm, around which everything else spins—sometimes with shocking violence. Tearing up landscapes and rearranging lifetimes. The elevator whirrs as it starts to move, picking up someone downstairs.

“Is it time?” he asks when the Courier steps out of the doors, but he thinks he knows anyway. If Bitter Springs isn’t next on the map now, it will be eventually.

Anything could happen out in the Wasteland or nothing at all. But Boone isn’t going there alone, and for better or worse he doubts he'll have to wait much longer.

 


End file.
